If you are starting a company because you want to be rich, you might want to think again. Until you become rich as you dreamed -we don’t want to be pessimistic but there is a high chance that you will never be- there might be a very long road, during which you need to go through uncertainty, dilemmas, decisions and perhaps poverty. If you cannot cope very well with stress, if you are used to living a life of luxury (what is a luxury is completely subjective and depends on our life standards and experience) and if you do not have capital of your own or secured from someone else, you might want to think again about starting your own company.

Anyway… Back to our subject; money. To be honest with you, finding funding for a company which is at its very early stages is probably one of the most difficult things you will have to go through. So instead… let’s start talking about saving money first. It might be a good idea to write down your expected expenses till your company starts trading. It is actually a very good exercise for the rest of your every day expenses. Before you write something in that spreadsheet, think;

Do you REALLY need it?

Is there a cheaper or -even better- a free, equally good, alternative available?

Can you do it by yourself?

We guarantee that if you answer these questions sincerely after you have done your research, you will probably save A LOT of money. Also people or companies you want to borrow money from, they will ask for this spreadsheet. They call it “cash flow projection” or something -that sounds equally important- among these lines.

But how much money do you or your investors need to spend on your project till you have your Minimum Viable Product (MVP)\your demo\your office\your store? The answer might give you a rough idea of how much money needs to be spend in order to start your company. Although writing down your expected expenses is a wise move and in spite of the fact that you did the best financial planning you could think of, that does not mean that you will manage to calculate exactly how much money you will end up spending. If you do, please get in touch with us. We need to talk. And the spreadsheet you made and update frequently will only give you a rough idea of your expenditures because as you will experience, expenses just come up.

When we started Academous, we tried to keep it simple. The question was how much money is needed in order to launch the website. The answer was easy; the minimum. Our shopping around indicated that we needed about 15K, most of it to be spent to develop a fully functional website. Not a lot of money one might think. But… we were working full time on the Academous project. So if you are in a similar situation, you will probably need to add your living expenses on top of the expenses for your demo\MVP\office\shop\. Still the big question is;

Where do you find funding?

Stay tuned! We will answer this question in our next post. Otherwise this would have been a long, boring post.